"Flash powder makes a more brilliant light than the arc lamp, but you can't use it to light your street corner because it doesn't last long enough. Stability is more essential to success than brilliance."-Richard Lloyd Jones

"I live in the space of thankfulness - and for that, I have been rewarded a million times over. I started out giving thanks for small things, and the more thankful I became, the more my bounty increased. That's because - for sure - what you focus on expands. When you focus on the goodness in your life, you create more of it."-Oprah Winfrey

"I think that economists should be very modest and humble in claiming to understand inflation."Your faithful editor thinks we should all be very modest and humble in claiming to understand just about anything. Just saying,

"Psychically sensitive aliens show up and complain that Earth is being too loud. The are obviously more technologically advanced than us and more than a little intimidating. What is the discussion on Earth? Do we meet their demands and try to be more neighborly? What major changes would have to happen in society? Are Zen Buddhists recruited to help quiet noisy minds? Do people fight back to retain their freedom of thought? What are the consequences if Earth doesn't quiet down?
If you struggle to "think outside the box," you might take a peek at this dandy little book. It will get you thinking.

"Thirty-five years have passed since a senior American official last visited Iran. It has changed. Our special report in this issue describes a country whose revolutionary fire has been extinguished.""Iran is not a straightforward dictatorship. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has the last word. But his role is to adjudicate between the claims of an elite made up of thousands of politicians, clerics, generals, academics and business people. They from a confusing and ever shifting pattern of competing factions and coalitions. Although this hardly amounts to a democracy, it is a political marketplace and, as Mr. Ahmadinejad discovered, politics that tack away from the consensus do not last. That is why last year Iran elected a president, Hassan Rohani, who wants to open up to the world and who has reined in the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Mr. Rohani belongs to the establishment, naturally but it says a lot about today's Iran that his cabinet contains more doctorates from American universities than Barack Obama's."-as excerpted from this The Economist essay

Mark Perry makes the case for capitalism as the ultimate anti-poverty program. Full post is here. Chart here:

Overlaying a chart on the relative decline of the American "middle class" might be interesting. That is, if you think there might be a correlation between the decline of both world poverty and the American middle class. Do you? Just wondering.

Let's all remember now that causation and correlation have very little to do with each other. For instance, check out Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations. In the installment pictured above, the rate of U. S. spending on science, space, and technology between 1999 and 2009 is highly correlated with the number of suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation over the same time period. Makes perfect sense to me.

During difficult times I often turn to a gospel song called "Stand." In it, songwriter Donnie McClurkin sings, "What do you do when you've done all you can, and it seems like it's never enough? What do you give when you've given your all, and it seems like you can't make it through?" The answer lies in McClurkin's simple refrain: "You just stand." That's where strength comes from - our ability to face resistance and walk through it.-Oprah Winfrey

I am not I. I am this oneWalking beside me whom I do not see,Whom at times I manage to visit,And at other times I forget.The one who remains silent when I talk,The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,The one who will remain standing when I die.-Juan Ramón Jiménez

The story that Jonathan Swift told is that he came into the world on November 30, 1667, in the house of his uncle Godwin Swift, in a little Dublin alley known as Hoey's Court. He was born there because his father had recently died at the age of twenty-seven, and his mother, Abigail, had moved in with her Swift relatives. The baby was named Jonathan, after his father. Abigail also had an eighteen-month-old daughter, Jane, and hardly any money.-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

Sunday, November 2, 2014

"The ordered spinning of the planets in space, the arrangements of solar systems in the universe, the design of the atom, the deep and inscrutable mystery of animation; surely we are blind if we fail to recognize the working of a supreme intelligence, guiding, molding, directing with purpose."-U. S. Andersen